My Public Apology

That, I imagine is to prevent revenge down-voting. It seems like a good idea to me.

Well done, the 100+ upvotes you've got on this post have totally counteracted the negative votes you got on the other post, and you end the day with a net profit. Goes to show.. when it comes to social networking, any publicity is good publicity!

If you've ever wondered why every society has so many carefully delineated, formal rituals surrounding death -- the sending of flowers, the publishing of obits, the ritualized expressions of sorrow, the formal funerals -- now you know.

If you've ever wondered why, after every major tragedy that affects a public gathering like a school, the local news reports that teams of grief counselors are being dispatched to the scene -- well, now you know. Grief counselors are trained to listen to people who are in shock. People in shock say strange things. Half of them are oversensitive, the other half tries to whistle past the graveyard, and if you put both halves in the same room and ask them to counsel each other the results can be really ugly, as we appear to have discovered. (I didn't read the original thread myself, though. I see enough pain in the course of life.)

All threads need moderators, but sometimes real life also needs moderators, and that's what grief counselors are for.

I recently had a friend-of-friends die suddenly in an accident. The range of responses was interesting. Some of his friends dissolved into tears. Some took pains to offer expressions of forgiveness and acceptance. Some raged against the cause of the accident. Some raged against the deceased. Some switched from one approach to another on a sentence by sentence basis.

Shock. That's how it works.

Someone with a large amount of intestinal fortitude and an even larger amount of malpractice insurance should start up an online grief counseling service.

Uhm, that seems the major point of his "apology" -- to protect his business, which he mentions several times in his "apology".

Though, you did not grasp the points of his apology, it's still substantiated for the rest of us.

There's always a temptation to say something stupid. And online, when there's really no social barrier that immediately stops you when you've said something you shouldn't, it's incredibly easy to get carried away.

I saw somebody on the other thread saying they were shocked, that it sounded like Reddit rather than Hacker News. And I thought: why wouldn't it sound like Reddit? The same users are crossing over. This is just the next stop for a lot of people. HN has no special checks encouraging better posting; it's up to the users. And a lot of users don't really care about this ideal of Hacker News as enlightened and thoughtful. They just see it as another place to post whatever comes to mind and to find good news stories.

If Hacker News is going to stay high-quality, then it requires every single user's being dedicated to its staying that way. That's not an easy task, especially not when a lot of users are joining right now, as HN is visibly declined. (Not much, but it's certainly not as good now as it was three months ago.) It means somehow convincing every user that this is not only worthwhile but necessary.

That's not likely: it's far too easy to slip up. I'm hoping, and I think Hacker News is a good place to make a stand - it's done incredibly well for the last two years - but I don't have any illusions about what the odds are of it staying like this.